One of Google’s new developments is the adding of another search element to their engine. Time. You can now search for a certain “freshness” of content in Google’s cache. Read more
Tag Archive for: Search Engine Land
SEO tips being lies? Okay, not always intentionally, but it happens. Mainly because with the ways SEO works changing so much, a lot of old techniques no longer work. Keeping on top of these makes a big difference.
There are several, but I’d recommend checking out this great list put together by Stephan Spencer, Chris Smith, Rand Fishkin, and Eric Enge on Search Engine Land.
Doing SEO for a massive site can be complex. In the case of a large e-commerce site, you have a ton of pages with the different products. How do you organize the categories do good SEO for all these pages?
This is a full project to do solid SEO, but some critical elements must be kept in mind.
- Google likes unique posts, good content
- Duplicate pages can hurt rankings
- You don’t need to have top listing for every one of your 10,000 pages
By looking at these concepts, this means that using the 80-20 rule is a great approach for doing good SEO for a huge site. Chances are 20% of your products produce 80% of your revenue. Focus on only these elements. Make these pages have solid content and fine-tune the on-page SEO here.
By doing this, you don’t spend so much time on the other few thousand pages, and the results are worth it. In addition to this, try to be careful about categorization – it can hurt to have categories cross each other to make duplicate pages. For example, having a clothing store with a leather category and a shoe category could have the same page in both “leather->shoe” and “shoe->leather”. There are ways to avoid this, although my recommendation is to initially construct the categories in a way that this never becomes an issue. By taking care of this up front it will help with many potential duplicate content issues.
Beyond these details, keeping great SEO for the site in general will always help. Following all these tips will increase your traffic and listing positions. For more details on SEOing e-commerce sites, check out this article by Eric Enge on Search Engine Land.
Google just upped their record from the 4th quarter of 2008 by 17%. So how much is that, exactly? Revenues in the 2008 4th quarter: $5.70 billion. And they’re only improving. Revenues in the 2009 4th quarter: $6.67 billion.
The fact that this is only for one fourth of the year blows my mind. If that stays consistent, then that’s in the neighborhood of $25 billion a year. They’re doing okay.
If you want to get more of the details on these numbers, check out this article from Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land.
In SEO, many people often think of the different types of SEO tactics that are put into play without ever really putting together a solid strategy. Knowing how to distinguish which tactics should be used for which market is a great skill. It’s something that is not focused on by all SEOs, but it really should be.
Beyond that, after determining which tactics are best, one of the best abilities to have is efficiency at various tasks. Knowing how to balance your time for each need that your projects require is a very valuable asset. Stephan Spencer described it very well in his article on Search Engine Land, I highly recommend viewing his tips on all of these often missed elements of SEO.
It’s not always dead on accurate, but by using Google in the right way you can often figure out what your significant other is interested in. How? By using what’s known as “predictive text”. It’s the ability by Google (and Yahoo) to see what you’re typing in and try to predict what you might be looking for. By only entering a few words in, you can often glean a lot of very interesting information.
For example, you can type in “how can I get my girlfriend to” and then let Google roll, see what it comes up with. (Warning, even though it’s only text, it’s not all child-friendly content.) Replace “girlfriend” with “boyfriend”, “wife”, “husband”, etc. and you have a new research tool.
Mind you, in many cases these results may not match at all with your significant other’s thoughts and desires, but it can still be fun to explore. And for marketers, this is a gold mine. These are the hot buttons that are looked for to prompt action by many marketers, and Google is just giving it to you.
If you want to see more detail and screenshots of examples of these, check out Vanessa Fox’s excellent article on Search Engine Land.
Apparently Google in Japan got a big penalty placed on them by Google themselves, taking their toolbar PageRank level from 9 to 5 (Search Engine Land posted an update about this on an earlier story they had). This is a huge sign – one, that Google takes bad actions by any site (even themselves) very seriously.
Only now has the penalty been removed, although the toolbar PageRank is only up to 8 (not 9). That’s almost a full year of penalization (11 months, to be precise).
The malady that Google Japan performed? They paid bloggers to review a new Google widget. This isn’t the first time Google instated a penalty on themselves – it does go to show that Google enforces their rules consistently, even against themselves.
It demonstrates that if you want to be sure to keep good rankings, you do have to follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
SEO is dead! Come the cries from doubters, and they do vocalize it occasionally. The latest is from a man named Robert Scoble. He doesn’t exactly say SEO is dead, but he questions its validity.
Well, SEO (and internet marketing, in general) is not a static element. There are always changes that fit into it. For people who think SEO is just making some on-page tweaks, then that alone will not do a lot. And as more people and businesses get online, that limited amount of result that pure on-page/on-site adjustments will get will only go down.
SEO has been questioned on how effective it truly is for years now, and many have said it wouldn’t last. As long as 12 years ago. Well, it’s lasted, and personally I think it will last – maybe not in exactly the same fashion, but it’s not going to go away.
Danny Sullivan had a lot of interesting points to say (as well as responding directly to Robert – check his post) in Search Engine Land. Of all people, I think Danny is someone who is worth listening to when it comes to predicting the progress of SEO. Check out his full post to see more.
Doing SEO for an e-commerce site is tricky. Almost all the pages are virtually identical, so it’s hard to determine how to do standard SEO for these pages. Here are five quick tips to help you do some solid SEO for your e-commerce site (a shortened version of the excellent explanation on Search Engine Land):
- Do solid SEO on product pages. Focusing on these will help draw traffic to each specific product. Standard SEO rules apply here – especially remember the title tag, as that will make a big difference. And keep it search engine friendly – using a lot of Flash or something else the spiders don’t like is not recommended.
- Proper categorization. Every product fits into specific categories. Making sure you use this as best you can will help. If selling a television, keep all categories in mind, such as a brand name, the size of the television, the type of tv, so forth. The more detailed your categories, the easier to find (good SEO).
- Avoid duplication. Having duplicate pages is a big SEO no-no. If you have your URLs structured based on categories, then you can often have each category branching through other categories to a single product, resulting in different URLs but the same content (duplicate pages). To avoid this, you can use parameters (the same URL, different arguments) or even just 301 the duplicate pages all to one single product page.
- Use the on-site search engine. To start, having a good on-site search engine is highly recommended for all internet marketing purposes. If you have one – checking the queries people put into it are easy ways to see what people are searching for that couldn’t find it naturally. This is a big “SEO THIS” sign.
- Social media! Yes, get on board. By letting people comment on your products or share them with others through social media, you can often get more inbound links than you might expect. Just make it easy for users and visitors to be able to share, whether it be through on-site widgets or a site blog, or even profiles on social media sites.
These tips will help your products on your e-commerce site be found, both through social media and through the search engines. These tips are a revised version of the excellent explanation by Aaron Bradley on Search Engine Land.
Google’s been doing live suggestions for a while now. But did you know you can actually use wild cards on the search line? No asterisk required, but you can simply add one character to a word to find any similar words that are searched for. So looking for “tree”, you could add an ‘a’ to make it “atree”, and Google will potentially show you “apple tree” as a suggestion.
It’s quite powerful and easy to do. To see some screen shots of how this works, check out this post on Search Engine Land.
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